FUTURE WORK

It's easy to figure out what kinds of technology jobs are the hottest right now -- just turn a couple of pages in this section and start reading the ads.

But if you are not going to be out of school for another five years (or 10 years, or more), everything will have changed. What's going to be hot then, so you can prepare for it now?

The experts agree that the two hottest fields will be software engineering and telecommunications, especially as they relate to the World Wide Web. But you might also want to take English, debate, drama and journalism classes.

Predicting what training the future workforce will need is no easy task, but it's one Pete Saflund, associate director of the Northwest Center for Emerging Technologies at Bellevue Community College in Bellevue, Wash., must try to accomplish. Saflund's organization was founded to "improve the quality, quantity and diversity of the information technology workforce."

"It's extremely risky to make precise predictions, said Saflund. "But I think that the impact of the Web on commerce will be long-lasting, persistent and pervasive, and will impact all levels of the economy in ways that we cannot even imagine today.

"Support of e-commerce is where I would set my sights, but hardly any of the information technology field is not touched by that. On the other hand, I can't tell you that any one particular area will be waning," he added.

There won't be much waning ahead for engineering occupations. Budding engineers will be interested to note that job opportunities for most of that industry are expected to go through the roof, according to projections by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Electrical engineers and civil engineers will see a more modest growth at 35.9 percent and "only" 21 percent, respectively.

But experts caution students not to dwell on these numbers. Instead of poring over them, they suggest that students look inward.

"Learn your own learning styles," Saflund said. "The ability to efficiently assimilate new information and use it productively will be the key to long-term success on the job."

Dave Berlanger, vice president of network service research at AT&T Labs Research Division in Florham Park, N.J. sees wireless communication and Web transactions as the big trends five years from now. Both depend a great deal on software engineering, especially "distributed object computing," he said.

"Increasingly, products are dominated by software, and the people who build the software have more influence over the direction of the products," Berlanger said. But what that also means is that the software engineers need to understand the big picture, he cautioned.

"The tradition in Information Technology has been to learn a collection of computer languages and then to branch out to the nuts and bolts of business, but given the influence that software has, it is important to branch out into marketing," he said.

Agreeing with Berlanger is Dr. Jeanette Harrison, director of training for Intel Corporation's Technology Manufacturing Group in Chandler, Ariz.

"We have more jobs than we can fill and we would hire as many good people as we could get our hands on," she said, noting that there are estimated to be 250,000 high-tech jobs now going begging in Silicon Valley alone.

"But looking out, one of the things we see happening as we evolve into a global Internet economy is an increasing demand for skill sets around e-business and e-commerce. More and more jobs will be created around the electronic transmission of information.

"With that, there will be much greater reliance on software engineers, network engineers, and the other people who keep the software infrastructure up and operational.

"I hear it from my peers wherever I go around the world, that they will need more software, hardware and network engineers," said Harrison. She would also like to see IT invent a new job classification: "technical translator" to serve as an intermediary between the users and the engineers.

But knowing the technology is no longer enough, she cautioned. In a global economy, even engineers have to be attuned to cultural diversity and must be able to work with people who are not like themselves. The basis of that ability is skill in oral and written communication, she said.

"We tell college graduates that what we are looking for is the application of knowledge in different aspects of the business, not just as originally taught. We want them to look at business problems and apply their skills--the application of business talent is what we really require," she said.

"There are so many opportunities --the sky is the limit," Harrison said. "But while it is essential to take the basic (technology) curriculum to be prepared for what you want to do, a Department of Labor study shows that today's graduates will have four different careers in their lifetimes. The best way to prepare for that is to learn how to learn, to take information and embed it in your way of thinking and the way you lead your life.

Meanwhile, the pace of change is not going to slow down, warned Stan Williams, head of basic research at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, Calif., "That makes a broad-based education more important than ever for students starting out. They should not think in terms of career training, but in terms of lifelong learning --they will need to learn how to learn effectively.

"People who are focused on training and trying to be a cog that fits into the machine could be left on the wayside. But it could be an extraordinarily exciting time for those who can retool themselves and follow the new technologies as they arise," Williams said.

Indeed, "That notion that you are going to get trained and then resell that training, and when its half-life has expired you get retrained--that has to change," Saflund added. "People talk about life-long learning, but that does not have to mean a continual treadmill of retraining. Instead, we may have a landscape where the distinction between work and school will blur, with renewal on a continual basis."

He foresees a model where industrial professionals work part-time while also having part-time faculty appointments at community colleges, and "infuse" into the classroom what they learn on the job, and vice versa.

"Another trend will be to not think in terms of traditional salaries, but in the overall marketability of skills," Saflund added. "People will take the skills they learn on one job and leverage them to get another. It will not be like the older model where the company provides both the training and the advancement path. People will make their own paths by accepting a challenging project, delivering it, and using it to build the next step of their career in another organization."

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